Cooking up controversy

Liu Chonghua, an eccentric cake millionaire, has constructed castles based on European models, but local authorities aren’t too happy with his architectural pluralism

By Tom Hancock / AFP, CHONGQING, China

Chinese cake millionaire Liu Chonghua is pictured in August in Chongqing. The businessman plans to build 100 European-style castles, but the seven he’s already built have landed him in hot water with local officials who want them demolished.

Photo: AFP

As the greatest urbanization drive in history swells China’s cities with ranks of identikit apartment blocks, one culinary businessman is indulging his architectural appetite with a visual feast of extravagant, outlandish castles.

“I don’t have any hobbies, except for planting trees and building castles,” said Liu Chonghua, standing on a crenellated turret atop the largest of the six he has constructed.

Liu, who made millions from feeding China’s growing appetite for cakes and bread, now plans to make his home in the grey stone structure, which resembles Britain’s Windsor Castle and towers above the surrounding rice fields.

His others include a red-brick fairy-tale edifice stacked with soaring spires, which seems to have emerged from Disney’s version of Aladdin, and a white confection with candy-colored towers reminiscent of Neuschwanstein, the hilltop fantasy built by Bavaria’s 19th century “Mad” King Ludwig II.

“When I was a child I heard stories about princes and castles,” said Liu, 59, adding that he grew up “with an empty stomach every day” in China’s countryside and was sent to dig ditches during the political upheavals of the 1960s.

After making his fortune, he said, “I wanted to turn the castles of my dreams into something real.”

Liu is one of several Chinese millionaires channeling their wealth into eccentric projects, but his designs have led to death threats and put him on a collision course with local officials in the southwestern megacity of Chongqing.

His designs were stimulated by buildings in Munich and the chateaux of France’s Loire Valley, he said, citing maverick Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi, designer of Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia cathedral, as an inspiration.

One of his construction workers, former soldier Ma Wenneng, tinkered with a fountain on a balcony and dismissed the challenges of recreating foreign designs on Chinese soil.

“Actually, European castles are really easy to build,” he said. “The boss has a book of castle pictures in his office and we use that as a reference.”

Escaping conformity

China’s building boom is unprecedented in human history, with the country’s urban population growing by an average of over 20 million people a year for more than a decade — resulting in hectares of utilitarian, cookie-cutter developments.

Urbanization has raised living standards for millions, but Liu says he is taking a stand against miles of identical apartments.

“China needs castles, because it needs a more pluralistic culture,” he said. “A city needs people who have dreams, to help society develop.”

Liu is not the only person chafing at China’s homogenous urban environment. The then-Vice Minister of Construction Qiu Baoxing (仇保興) complained in 2007 of “a thousand cities having the same appearance.”

Tom Miller, an expert on China’s urbanization, said: “If you were parachuted in blind to almost any Chinese city, and you were looking around, you would have the same uniform buildings.

“When you are building at that kind of enormous speed, you don’t worry about aesthetic niceties,” he added.

But daring new projects from Chinese developers, often employing star international architects, and state-led efforts to renovate historical districts suggest a gradual shift in attitudes.

“People are realizing that it’s not good for everything to look identical, and are realizing tourists will pay to see something different,” Miller said.